I spend a lot of time talking about protecting highly virtualized environments because so many people still struggle with it. In fact, ESG published a whole report on it earlier in 2013:
ESG Report: Trends in Protecting Highly Virtualized Environments
Server virtualization solves a lot of challenges for IT. And if I wasn’t a “backup guy,” I would be a “Virt-Dude,” because it is such a transformational IT catalyst. But those layers of abstraction created by clusters, hosts, and your favorite virtualized (aka software-defined) storage/networking can also create complexities for your data protection solution.
So, as we start thinking about how we will do things smarter and more effectively in 2014, here is a short (6m) video to hopefully get you thinking about what to plan for in your 2014 Data Protection Strategy:
Anyone (or almost anyone) can reliably back up a VM – the real question is how agile is your restore? Granularity? Application specific? From an alternate host? From the backup storage pool? These are the more interesting questions and scenarios to consider.
If your virtualization-protection solution already has that agility, and it meets the four directives in this video of “what to look for” … then you have one more thing to be thankful for during this holiday season. If not, then your virtualization protection is not as good as it could/should be.
As always, thanks for watching.
[Originally posted on ESG’s Technical Optimist.com]